Gary Francione Interviewed by Tilda Storey Law

Leading academic authority on animal rights and animal rights campaigner Professor Gary Francione looks at the latest thinking about eating meat and our attitudes towards it.

Should we eat animals? Until recently, this question was largely an academic one across much of the West. Of course, it’s morally acceptable to eat meat. But the public are now beginning to question the morality of meat-eating, and this is increasingly reflected in restaurant menus and on supermarket shelves. Might we look back in 100 years at our current attitudes to killing and eating other species in the same way we now look back at slavery – baffled at how blind we were to our own immorality? And, given so many of us do recognise the immorality of eating factory-farmed meat products, why do we continue to do it?

Francione is a world- leading authority on animal rights and a leading animal rights campaigner. He was the first academic to teach animal rights theory in an American law school. Francione’s books on animal ethics include Why Veganism Matters and Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? He is professor of law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University and visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln in the UK. Here he talks to Tilda Storey Law, a graduate student at Goldsmith’s College. She recently graduated from The University of Nottingham where she wrote her dissertation on the meat paradox.